Increasing numbers of users view content, such as video data, online using one or more video hosting sites. Additionally, many video hosting sites allow users to view streaming video of live events or other content in real-time. Often, users viewing content provide comments, such as text data, related to the content, and these comments are presented along with the content. Receiving and distributing comments allows a video hosting site to provide a forum for visitors to interact with each other while viewing content, enhancing user interaction with the video hosting site.
However, when content is popular, a large number of users may view the content, making it impractical for users accessing the content to provide comments and view comments from other users in a single location. For example, if over one thousand viewers view content, such as a live event, concurrently, it is unwieldy for a video hosting site to receive and present comments from all of the users in a single location. Some conventional video hosting sites seek to mitigate this by partitioning users into groups having a fixed size, where users within a group view comments received from other users within the group but do not view comments received from users included in a different group.
However, conventional methods for partitioning users into groups specify a maximum number of users within a group and when the maximum number of users is reached in a group, a new group is created and users are added to the new group until it reaches the maximum number of users. While this limits the group size, partitioning users based solely on number of users in a group allows certain users to be included in a group without any other users, limiting the user's ability to interact with other users.